The Frugal Superintendent

Charles Adair, the superintendent of the public schools here doesn't
mind being called frugal. In fact, it's something of an honor in these
parts to be considered thrifty, particularly when you're in charge of a
$9 million annual budget. To save on the electric bill, Adair turns off
the lights when he leaves his office for lunch. For years, he had an
agreement with a nearby district to buy its school buses after they'd
been used for five years. "They were in good shape," he told me, "and
about a third the price of new ones."

In 1992, when a snowstorm caved in the roof of the district's
administration building--a former school erected in 1915--Adair used
the insurance money to rebuild rather than construct a brand-new
facility, which would have cost the taxpayers $200,000. "We saved
money," he said, "and we kept an old landmark."

Adair (accent on the first syllable, as in "hey there") doesn't have
a motto, but if he did, it just might be, "If it's broke, fix it." His
reputation for being tightfisted is well-known among the citizens of
this small Ozark town, an agricultural hamlet set in the state's scenic
northwest corner, about a 2-1/2-hour drive from Little Rock. "I once
heard someone describe Charles Adair as so tight--let's call it
economically conservative--that he would crawl in and out of the
windows to keep from wearing out the doors," noted D. Jeff Christenson,
the publisher of the Harrison Daily Times. It's hard to imagine
Adair--a courtly gentleman with a soft Southern accent--scuffing up his
pressed wool slacks on a window sill, but he does admit to being a
smart shopper when it comes to running the district, which serves 2,900
students. "I try to spend money wisely and save money where I can," he
said matter-of-factly, as if the point were so obvious that it didn't
even need to be stated.

Adair, of course, isn't the only school superintendent to be careful
with the taxpayers' dollars. What makes the Harrison school district so
remarkable is the bang it gets from its bucks. The district's per-pupil
cost of $2,900 is about half the national average, yet its students'
test scores are in the top 10 percent nationally. Last year, American
Demographics magazine asked SchoolMatch, a Columbus, Ohio-based
research company, to identify districts that produce high-achieving
students at low cost. The firm singled out nine districts that rank
both in the 81st or higher percentile in pupil performance and in the
39th or lower percentile in per-pupil costs. Harrison was one of the
standouts: According to SchoolMatch, the district ranks in the 95th
percentile for pupil performance and in the 5th percentile for
per-pupil spending.

Sixty percent of Harrison High School's graduates go on to college.
Last year, college-bound seniors received more than $1 million in
scholarship money, and 10 students completed their studies with perfect
4.0 grade-point averages. In recent years, many graduates have enrolled
at the local community college or at the University of Ar~kansas, about
80 miles away in Fayetteville, but a handful have attended such top
schools as Harvard, Princeton, Cornell, and Vanderbilt, and the
district has graduates at all of the military academies. "We have high
expectations for all of our students," Adair said.

So, how does Harrison do it? How does it spend so little yet get so
much? Certainly, the superintendent is a major factor. "Dr. Adair sets
the tone," said Paul Shrum, the principal of Forest Heights Elementary
School. Larry Dale, a counselor at Harrison High School, agreed but
pointed out that Adair's determination to get a dollar's value for
every dollar spent is shared by the community at large. "They're not
going to spend millions of dollars and get nothing in return," he said,
"and Dr. Adair knows that. He is tightfisted to some degree. But, on
the other hand, I've never had him turn down anything I've ever
requested. If you show him that you need this or that, he's more than
willing to do it if it's at all possible. But he will not just throw
money to the wind. Everybody's like that here. You just don't waste
things. It's part of the Ozark culture."

One might expect Harrison's schools to be held together with
Band-Aids, but that's not the case. Many of the facilities are old, but
they are well-maintained. Harrison High School, built eight years ago,
is virtually graffiti-free. (When I visited the school, about the only
scribblings I saw on lockers were "Hi Jim" and "You Suck!") Its science
classrooms are filled with beakers, test tubes, and Bunsen burners, and
its library is well-stocked with books and magazines.

The key to the Harrison school district's success, I discovered, is
more complicated than careful per-pupil expenditure. Nearly everyone I
spoke with cited community support--financially, emotionally, and
otherwise--as one of the most important factors. On any given day,
Harrison's schools are packed with parents helping out
teachers--grading papers, tutoring students, doing whatever. Local
businesses "adopt" individual schools, donating computers, books, and
other valuable resources. Many of the town's retailers give 10 percent
discounts to honor-roll students. In short, the people of Harrison seem
to understand that community involvement can make or break a school
system. "Our philosophy," one teacher said, "is: 'It takes a whole
village to raise a child.' Everybody pitches in here."

To Charles Adair, however, it all begins with a simple,
common-sensical notion: Be careful how you spend your money. "I think
my parents instilled that in me," he said. "We didn't have a lot of
money, but they taught me to appreciate what we did have. We didn't
have new cars; our houses were fairly small, but they were nice houses,
and my folks always took pride in keeping things clean and neat."

We were sitting in Adair's office, a pleasant room with high
ceilings, large windows, and deep-blue wall-to-wall carpet. It was
clean, neat, and free of the usual administrative clutter. Behind
Adair's desk were an Arkansas state flag and an American flag. Off to
the side was an old-looking personal computer. It was turned off.

"My great-grandfather homesteaded here around 1850," the 56-year-old
Adair said. "Matter of fact, I have the land patent he received in 1854
from Franklin Pierce." The only son of an electrician and a
schoolteacher, Adair attended 1st through 12th grades in the Harrison
public schools and then went on to the University of Arkansas. Growing
up, Adair was taught the importance of being thrifty. His parents grew
their own fruits and vegetables, which they would can at the end of the
summer, and sometimes they would butcher their own meat. "That's the
way most people lived around here, not just me," he said. "We never
felt poor, but we didn't have a lot of extras."

As superintendent of the Harrison public schools, a job he has held
for the past seven years, Adair has simply taken the values he grew up
with and applied them to the way he runs the district.

"We don't have a lot of money in the bank," he said of the
district's finances. "We don't have CDs stashed away that we're not
spending. We spend our money, but we budget. If someone came to me
today and told me that they needed some textbooks, more than likely I'd
say, 'Go ahead and order them.' In fact, every year our budget has
extra money in it for textbooks, beyond what the state requires."

Adair has also been careful not to borrow too much money. "It's just
like at home," he said. "If you make a lot of money, but you have high
debts, then you won't have much left over." Currently, the district's
only major liability is a $5 million bond that was issued eight years
ago to finance the construction of Harrison High. "We've got 11 more
years left on that," Adair said. "Then, we'll practically be
debt-free."

He handed me a piece of paper that he had typed up. At the top, it
said, "High Achievement/Low Cost," and below was a list of 24 reasons
why Harrison has acquired its enviable reputation. They included: "good
work ethic of staff and community," "community support of education,"
"careful spending," "staff and school board stability," "utilization of
older buildings," "minimum number of administrators," "high academic
expectations," "excellent teaching staff," "safe school environment,"
"test-taking skills taught to students," and "concerned about energy
cost savings."

Expanding on one of the points on his list, Adair noted proudly that
the Harrison district has virtually no central-office bureaucracy. The
focus of any school system, he said, should be on instruction, not
administration. To that end, the district's entire administrative staff
consists of Adair, one assistant superintendent, one special-education
supervisor, one gifted-education coordinator, and five secretaries.
Period.

Principals report directly to Adair. "You need to streamline the
administration, keep the layers of bureaucracy to a minimum," Adair
said. "I feel good that I know all the teachers by their first names
and can recognize them when I see them at meetings. That's important to
me." (For comparison's sake, Adair mentioned a nearby district, about
the same size as Harrison, that has three assistant superintendents.
"I'm not sure what they all do," he said, genuinely puzzled.)

Harrison's 187 teachers are paid an average annual salary of
$28,538, lower than the national average but slightly above the state
average of $27,805. Some are members of the Arkansas Education
Association, but because Arkansas is a right-to-work state, the union
does not engage in collective bargaining. Nonetheless, Harrison's
teachers do have a say in determining sal~aries (thanks to the
district's state-mandated committee on personnel policies), and they
are given a great deal of freedom within their own classrooms. Perhaps
that explains why staff turnover is so low; some teachers have taught
two generations of the same family.

Adair characterized the district's approach to teaching and learning
as "traditional"; the school board, he said, is "cautious about using
unproven ideas." But, he added, "we try to be open-minded about new
ideas. You get in trouble when you say there's just one way that
children learn." The result is a sort of traditionalism mixed with
pragmatism. If a teacher wants to use whole language or cooperative
learning, fine--as long as the kids are learning. (When I visited
Forest Heights Elementary, I noticed that one teacher had her students
sitting in rows, while another had them in small groups, and a third
had them in a large half-circle. Principal Paul Shrum said he
encourages such diversity of teaching styles among his
instructors.)

I was struck by the lack of filing cabinets in the administration
building, so I asked Adair if that was intentional. "Yes," he said. "I
don't believe in paperwork. You won't find me doing more of it than the
state requires. I'm also not too big on surveys. If they're not
required, I won't do them because my purpose here is instruction, and
if some company wants to know what kind of computers we're using, then
they'll just have to come see for themselves. You can end up shuffling
a lot of paper, and I'm not sure what that accomplishes."

At Harrison High School, the waiting area in the main office was
crowded with students, all of them dressed in the usual combination of
blue jeans and T-shirts. A small radio was playing country music. A
secretary glanced at one of the students and said, "Terry, you need to
get your feet off the seat. Do you sit like that at home?"

After a few minutes, I was ushered into the office of Danny Gilbert,
the school's principal. A huge man with red hair and a Southern accent
as thick as molasses, Gilbert was wearing a bright-green sport coat
with gold buttons. His desk was covered with rough drafts of next
year's teaching schedule. "I've been working on this thing all week,"
he told me. "Just when you think you've got it all figured out, you
look at it, and there's a glitch as big as Christmas."

Last year was Gilbert's first full year as principal, but he's been
with the Harrison schools for the past 20 years. "I worked in another
school district in Arkansas," he said, "but the expectations for all
students--and I emphasize the word all--were not as great as they are
here. We expect all of our students to get a complete education,
whether that means they want to be a better welder, a top-flight
attorney, a top-flight physician, or a top-flight draftsman. We try to
provide opportunities for all students. The other district tried to
provide opportunities for the majority of its students, but not
necessarily all of them."

Gilbert and his staff encourage all Harrison High students to take
college-entrance examinations--the American College Testing Assessment
or the Scholastic Assessment Test--early and often. "It's a mental
thing," he said. "Some of these kids may take it six times. I think you
learn from experience, so they may gradually add a few more points to
it every time."

I asked Gilbert about his boss. "Dr. Adair is a good man to work
with," he said. "If there is truly a need for something, he'll try to
explore every avenue possible to see that you have it. Of course, he's
working under the constraints of a budget, but if there's a real need
for something, he'll try to find a way to get it."

I wondered if Adair had ever turned down one of Gilbert's requests.
"No," he said, "but I'm sure he has with others. It hasn't happened to
me because I'm a whole lot like he is when it comes to spending
money."

Gilbert admitted that he sometimes visits other schools and sees
things he would like to have for his teachers and students. "But would
I trade places with them?" he asked. "No. All the essentials are here.
Maybe some of the frills are not."

The principal introduced me to math teacher Mary Chew, who has
taught at Harrison High for 11 years. I asked her if she ever felt
deprived of supplies or equipment. "We could always use more," she
said, "but we're not lacking. Basically, we get what we need. If we
have a real serious need, we can either get it from the usual funds,
or, if that's not possible, some company will come in and take care of
it.

"Dr. Adair," she continued, "is very careful, and we appreciate
that. Because it means that the money we need for books and supplies is
not being frivolously thrown away. Of course, there are some things
that he has to say no to. I would love it if every student, or at least
every two students, had a computer. I have one computer. But I'm
thrilled to death that I have one. By the way, it was purchased half
with public funds and half with private funds."

Later, I visited Forest Heights Elementary School, where I met Paul
Shrum. He looked more like a businessman than a principal, but his
tie--made of red silk but decorated with a large smiling sun drawn by a
child--gave him away. Shrum showed me around the 31-year-old building
(a new wing is under construction), where he has been principal for the
past four years. The concrete floor in the main hallway had a few chips
here and there, but it was coated with a hard polish that shone under
the fluorescent lights. As we walked through the school, Shrum told a
story that neatly summed up the sense of thrift that pervades the
district--and the community.

"We have some desks here that were looking kind of old when I
arrived," Shrum said, "so I asked Dr. Adair if I could take them to an
auto body shop and have them spray-painted. I hated to spend a lot of
money on new desks; they're made of plastic, and these were made of
metal. So we took them to the shop and had them painted. We still have
those desks, and they're in good shape."

He added: "Our teachers realize that because of budgetary reasons,
they can't always have new things. So they make everything that they
have work as long as they can."

Shrum guided the way to the school's empty lunchroom, where three
PTA members--Karen Coolidge, Melissa Davis, and P.J. Reynolds--were
busy trimming the edges of some drawings done by the students in Amy
Young's 4th-grade class. Young herself had laminated the drawings--of
such notable Americans as George Washington, Lou Gehrig, Clara Barton,
and Walt Disney--with plastic, but it was now up to these three parents
to provide the finishing touches.

I asked the mothers how often they helped out at the school.

"I'm up here every day." Coolidge told me.

"We live here!" Davis added.

"Your kids do better if you're involved with their school," Reynolds
said.

At Skyline Heights Elementary School--a one-story brick building set
atop a hill in a quiet residential neighborhood--Principal Cathy Ramsey
said that parents are "just part of the school." On the day we met, in
fact, 14 parents had taken a group of students on a field trip to
College of the Ozarks, just up the road in Point Lookout, Mo. "If I
need some help," she said, "all I have to do is pick up the phone."

Ramsey introduced me to 2nd-grade teacher Joan Reid, who had
recently gotten in touch with the local hospital to get old X-rays to
use in a science lesson. Meanwhile, Miller Hardware Store had donated
seeds, batteries, copper wire, and corks. "If you don't ask for it,"
the teacher said, "you're not going to get it!" (Admittedly, Reid has
an inside track; her husband manages the store.)

"I have a lot of resourceful teachers," Ramsey said. "Of course, we
would all like to get more money from the district, but we try to take
a realistic view. Funds are limited; you can't have everything you
want. But the teachers don't allow that to affect the quality of the
education they offer their students. They'll look for money, they'll
call businesses, they'll look for grants to apply for. They do a lot of
searching to get what they need for these kids."

Like many of the people I met during my visit, Ramsey grew up in
Harrison. She moved to the area when she was in 4th grade, attended
Forest Heights Elementary, and graduated from Harrison High. She now
has two sons attending schools in the district; her youngest, in fact,
goes to Skyline Heights. "This is a wonderful place to raise children,"
she said.

Small-town America is alive and well in Harrison, population 10,000.
Once a week, the Boone County Livestock Auction brings hundreds of
local farmers to the locale, which was founded in 1869. On Fridays, the
Harrison Daily Times publishes a list of nearly 150 area churches,
Baptist being the most numerous. Bible-belt values predominate; other
than at the Holiday Inn and a few private golf clubs, there is no
public sale of alcohol in Boone County. "This is a very conservative
community," said Jeff Christenson, the newspaper publisher.

The people in Harrison are proud of their sense of tradition.
"Because we are a small town," Harrison High history and economics
teacher Judy Stroope told me, "we still have the benefit of most people
knowing each other. There is a sense of community that may not exist in
other locations. We have a high percentage of people who still follow
very traditional lifestyles here. The community has a religious
foundation to it; many of our students--many of them--attend church on
a regular basis, so they get a value system not only from a traditional
family but also from some form of religious training."

To be sure, there is a shared system of values and beliefs in
Harrison, which undoubtedly has an effect on the schools. But there is
also an obvious lack of diversity. As Charles Adair put it, "This is
mostly an Anglo-Saxon area." In fact, there are virtually no
African-Americans in Boone County; according to the 1990 census, there
were 28,297 people living in the county, five of whom were black. The
census listed 176 American Indians, 171 Hispanics, 44 Asians, and 34
"other." Furthermore, the majority of Harrison's students are solidly
middle-class.

"This community," Christenson said, "never had to face some of the
integration problems that other communities had to face, which made it
very difficult for schools to put dollars where they really needed to
put dollars. Schools in the South were tremendously ripped apart during
the 1960s and '70s, but Harrison didn't have to deal with that."

Given Harrison's history and demographics, some might argue that the
district has a tremendous advantage over those with large numbers of
poor, disadvantaged students. "Maybe part of the reason for our
success," Adair told me, "is because we're a fairly homogeneous group.
We are a lot alike, in that this is a mostly agricultural community; we
don't have a lot of industry. And the people here all seem to
appreciate and value education."

I wondered what would happen if more minorities moved into Harrison.
Would there be racial conflict in the schools? Adair said no, but one
teacher I spoke with disagreed. "There would be tension," said the
teacher, who asked not to be identified. "A lot of people in the
community would have a negative feeling. Some of them would be rude and
come up to the people and tell them to go home. This is not a
multicultural community--you know what I mean?"

Like most small towns, Harrison is not as picture-perfect as it
seems on the surface. "We're not without problems," Christenson said.
"We've got drug problems, alcohol problems, and we've even seen a few
signs of gang activity." Branson, Mo., the booming country-music
mec~ca, is about a half-hour drive north on Highway 65--close enough to
boost Harrison's economy, but not without a catch. "The downside,"
Christenson said, "is that Branson has attracted an awful lot of
transient people, and that's affected us. There's virtually no place to
live in Branson, so a lot of those folks are living here and commuting
back and forth."

Adair worries about such things. "The direction of society as a
whole does bother me," he said. "I wonder what these schools are going
to be like after I've retired."

For now, however, Harrison's troubles seem relatively minor. The
kinds of problems that big-city districts face on a daily
basis--violence, guns, graffiti--are virtually nonexistent. "It's much
easier to teach here," one teacher told me. "You don't have the
discipline problems that you have in other schools." Which raises a few
questions: Can Harrison's formula for success be replicated elsewhere?
Can a mammoth urban school district--New York City's, for
example--learn anything from a small district in the heart of the
Ozarks? Well, yes and no. There's no disputing that, in some respects,
Harrison has got it easy; fortune has smiled on the district, and the
teachers and administrators all seem to know it.

"We're very lucky to have a lot of dedicated faculty members who
have a sense of mission in their work," said teacher Judy Stroope. "Few
of the teachers here consider this 'just a job.' I think we're very
lucky to have a lot of parent participation, more than most districts
have. And our community is more clear on what it wants to accomplish
through education than some districts are. And finally, we're lucky in
that we still have a very traditional community here, which is an asset
to us because our district is not changing as rapidly as some districts
are."

Still, it would be a mistake to dismiss Harrison as merely lucky.
After all, many of Charles Adair's "secrets" are not secrets at all.
For instance, it doesn't take a genius to figure out that money spent
on school administration is money not spent on instruction. In fact,
nearly all of the 24 reasons on Adair's "High Achievement/Low Cost"
list are applicable to any school district, whatever the size. "If a
district came to me," he told me, "and said, 'We're too large. We can't
do what you do,' I would say, 'Break your school district into
segments, then try to do what we do. Hire good teachers; hire people
because of what they can do for the students and the school, not
because of what the school can do for them."'

M. Donald Thomas, the president of the School Management Study
Group, a Salt Lake City consulting firm that audits school
effectiveness, hasn't been to Harrison, but he knows why the town's
schools do so well. "The most effective school districts," he said,
"focus all their efforts on instruction. They don't waste a lot of
money on administration."

I asked Thomas about the efficacy of using standardized-test results
to rate schools. Many reformers, I pointed out, argue that test scores
do not necessarily reflect how well-educated students are. Thomas,
however, defended the practice. "Until we find a better way," he said,
"that's the only way we have. It is a measure. Is it a complete
measure? No. But it's a valid measure."

To Harrison High Principal Danny Gilbert, the district's success all
comes down to one thing: community trust. "If the community gives us a
lot of money," he said, "and they see a lot of waste, well, what is
that old saying? 'You can go to the well once too often.' If they can
see where their dollars are being spent, then I think the money will
always be there."

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